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Answered

Unintended User Data Pollution Due to Intercom's Handling of Company Associations

  • February 14, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 34 views

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Context:

We are experiencing data pollution caused by Intercom’s handling of user-company associations. Our setup includes:

  • All companies and users are created via API.
  • The Intercom widget is used in our app, on our marketing website, and on our login page.
  • Users are identified via an identify call upon login.
  • Qualification questions are asked to visitors/leads through the widget.

Problem:

When a visitor answers qualification questions and subsequently logs in, Intercom automatically links the company from the qualification process to the user. This results in users being assigned to multiple companies, despite only having one company in our system.

Impact:

  • Incorrect company assignments, leading to broken rules and misrouted CS workflows.
  • Erroneous email triggers, such as onboarding or setup emails for "new" companies that were not actually created by us.
  • Reporting issue, etc. 

Expected Behavior:

Intercom should not assign a company to an identified user based on prior qualification responses. Instead, company associations should strictly follow our API logic.

Request:

We need a way to prevent or override this automatic company linking behavior to ensure data integrity and proper CS operations.

Best answer by Emilygav

Hi there ​@Jean-Charles, Emily here from Support Engineering at Intercom 👋🏼

I understand your issue here is due to when a visitor fills out qualification forms in Intercom, a "Qualification Company" is automatically created and linked to the user, even before they authenticate. This can lead to users being associated with multiple companies if they later log in and are linked to these pre-created companies.

One workaround I can think of for this is using a technical workaround involving our webhooks and API.

You could detect when companies are created and delete them accordingly if it turns out to be a qualification company ID.

You could use the company.created webhook 👇

And then the Delete a company endpoint 👇

This would (hopefully) prevent multiple companies being associated with a user.

 

Hopefully this helps 💪🏼

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1 reply

Emilygav
Intercom Team
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  • Intercom Team
  • 84 replies
  • Answer
  • February 28, 2025

Hi there ​@Jean-Charles, Emily here from Support Engineering at Intercom 👋🏼

I understand your issue here is due to when a visitor fills out qualification forms in Intercom, a "Qualification Company" is automatically created and linked to the user, even before they authenticate. This can lead to users being associated with multiple companies if they later log in and are linked to these pre-created companies.

One workaround I can think of for this is using a technical workaround involving our webhooks and API.

You could detect when companies are created and delete them accordingly if it turns out to be a qualification company ID.

You could use the company.created webhook 👇

And then the Delete a company endpoint 👇

This would (hopefully) prevent multiple companies being associated with a user.

 

Hopefully this helps 💪🏼


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